MEXICO: A bird in the Australian outback is communicating in a way previously attributed only to humans, a study shows.
The study published in the journal PLOS biology found the chestnut-crowned babbler was able to string together sounds and mix them up in order to communicate different meanings.
Researchers have long known that birds can put together different sounds and patterns for the songs they sing, but these were not believed to hold meaning, lead author Sabrina Engesser of the University of Zurich said.
“Changing the arrangement of sounds within a song does not seem to alter its overall message,” she said.
But the babbler bird does not sing.
“Instead its extensive vocal repertoire is characterised by discrete calls made up of smaller acoustically distinct individual sounds,” Ms Engesser said.
Researchers studied the bird calls and found that different patterns were used in certain circumstances.
For instance, two sounds that scientists named A and B were combined for a flight call (AB) and for a feeding call (BAB).
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